Training paces

Currently my schedule for my marathon(3:20 hopefully) tells me my slow run should be 8:25-8:45 however today and previously i ran 15 miles at 8:16 only beginning to struggle in the headwind at the end.

What i would like to know is, Is this pace to fast for my slow run? i appreciate the slow run is about your body adjusting and feeding itself differently to when you are doing tempo work, but im not to sure if its too fast.

Something I found useful when marathon training was running around half of my long run at anticipated marathon race pace. (In your case this would be 7:40s for a 3-20). After my first 2 marathons I realised that I'd done my long slow runs and my interval/threshold work but I hadn't trained at all at the pace at which I was running the marathon. Marathon number 3 I went from 3-35 to 3-16 on less training. On a 20 mile training run I'd do 9 miles easy at 9:00 - 10:00 miles, 10 miles at around 7:30s and then a mile warm down. I found it helped a lot on race day that I was used to the pace I'd done in training.

I felt that I was having trouble with my LSRs a few months ago - didn't think I was working myself hard enough etc - and I found this to be a useful article about long training runs. In summary he suggests using two types of LSR in training.

1. The Long 'Slow' Run. The aim of this run being to run for a prolonged period of time to get your body used to burning fat for fuel, rather than carbs. He suggests doing these runs with little or no fuel (ie. carbs) in the body beforehand, but obviously whether or not you do this is down to you.

2. The type of run suggested by Ginger Tom. Starting out at your slow pace but finishing at marathon pace, or faster. This is to get the body used to running faster when tired.

I done my lsr (15miles @8.24-8.44 furthest i have ever ran i may add) I ran this at 8:16 on undulating roads and was more than comfortable until the last 3 miles which was into a headwind, my pace never slowed but i had to work harder to maintain my pace, for this part.

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